Long Chain Polymer

With Marrisa Lee Benedict

The first in a series of collaborations with Marissa Lee Benedict, “Long Chain Polymer” is an installation that addresses materials as matter to be re-envisioned, reconstituted and remade. The geodesic “Bucky dome” constructed at the center of the piece is “skinned” with fragile sheets of homemade bio-plastic — a material produced by boiling potato starch with glycerin and vinegar, elongating and re-arranging the short starch molecules into longer, more plastic polymers. Growing potato plants in the space via a small mobile station, the piece takes the potato as material and metaphor, re-examining its potential as food, clothing and shelter. The sculpture is both a document of the working process and a work-in-process itself: thinking and re-thinking ideas of sustainability and utopic ideologies.